


A Shopping Spree To Calm The Nerves

by secreterces5



Series: Group Therapy For Child Protagonists/Good End Friends [1]
Category: Gravity Falls, Star vs. The Forces Of Evil, Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Crossover, Dialogue Heavy, Fear of Abandonment, Good End Friends, Shopping Malls, Shopping for Clothes, Steven gets a spiky jacket, Steven only has one shirt design and that’s a crime, but also wears a dress, but uses he/him pronouns, everyone is taller than Steven in this, group therapy for child protagonists, making new friends, non-binary Marco, they’re cool and I love them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-08
Updated: 2020-04-08
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:02:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23536489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/secreterces5/pseuds/secreterces5
Summary: Marco sees a guy in group therapy sitting alone and decides to join him.Mabel later overhears that Steven only ever wears one single shirt design and is determined to help change that.They go shopping for clothes together and talk about the fear of being alone.
Series: Group Therapy For Child Protagonists/Good End Friends [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1693804
Comments: 18
Kudos: 221





	A Shopping Spree To Calm The Nerves

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, some warnings: Steven has a mild anxiety attack (I hope that’s the right term, he panics because he thinks he’s weird and that’s it), Marco is non-binary while using he/him pronouns both of them, at one point, are wearing feminine clothes. If anyone has a problem with this for any reason, be warned.  
> Also, I love shopping malls because sometimes they feel like giant colorful labyrinths, and I am projecting this love onto Steven.  
> Also also, Mabel calls people nicknames every chance she gets, except her idea of nicknames are just people’s names twisted beyond recognition.  
> Also also also: Mabel is the eldest out of the three, and Marco and Steven are the same age. That’s why everyone is taller than Steven.

Steven didn’t originally like the idea of spending time with other people from therapy outside of the sessions. Although he felt a kindred spirit within every one of these teenagers whenever they talked of their own ends of the world, listening to them for too long only served as a reminder of all of his own baggage, and he felt as though he should have more time to process without getting reminded of all of it everytime.

After some of the sessions they got to eat snacks together, and usually, he found himself just sitting somewhere aside from the bigger groups and quietly observing others, which, when he thought about it, would have actually been so oddly out of character for his younger self. He preferred not to think about that.

But then, one day, one of the kids sat down next to him. A boy who, despite probably being the same age as Steven, was visibly taller than him ( _ then again, _ Steven thought, just a tad sour,  _ who isn’t taller than me? _ ), had brown hair reaching down to his shoulders, and hazel eyes that held warmth and strength in equal amount. He didn’t come as often as others did and it became apparent to Steven after just a few sessions that his own adventure left him in a much better state of mind than many others, but despite only meeting him two or three times and not really listening to his incredibly unbelievable happy endings, he remembered that this boy’s name was Marco. Meeting hundreds of gems on the daily trained Steven to remember names well.

At first, he wasn’t too excited about this Marco sitting next to him when he could sit literally anywhere in a pretty big room, but then Steven imagined his younger self approaching and befriending anything that dared to breathe in his presence, and he decided now is as good time as any to get back into that habit. Meeting new people should be good for him, after all.

“H-hi?” he smiles hesitantly and mentally slaps himself for stuttering. He shouldn’t really be this distressed about chatting with an obviously friendly person. And yet, here he was.

“Hey,” the boy smiled. “Sorry, I wasn’t sure if you’d want to talk.”

“I’m not sure either, to be perfectly honest,” Steven chuckled awkwardly. “I probably should, though.”

At this, the other boy leans forward on his chair and his brows furrow. “Hey man, if you don’t feel like dealing with people, that’s totally okay. Just say the word.”

Steven considers this. He makes a mental note to appreciate such an offer, but then shakes his head: “No, no, I’d like to talk. Not about therapy, though, I’ve had enough of that for today.”

“Heh, that’s understandable. It can be exhausting.”

“You’re Marco, right?”

“Yup, and you’re Steven?”

It’s nice to have people remember him by this name rather than… any others, and never accidentally mistaking one for another. He nods.

“You haven’t been coming to these for long, are you new in town?”

“Oh, yeah, I um… spent my whole life in one city and with my alien family and the only other place I’ve ever been to is space, ironically, so I left to travel on my own to, you know, actually get to know my own planet.” And to get away from his gem half and get to know his human half, but he doesn’t say that. Marco seems to understand the subtext anyways.

“Well, if you’d like, we could hang out later?” Marco offers.

For a second, Steven could only stare at him, and then he had to briefly questioned why this guy’s friendliness caught him so off guard. “Y-you’d wanna hang out with me? Just like- just like that?” Dang, there’s that stutter again.

“Pff, yeah! You seem really nice, Steven, but you also seem like you could really use a friend on this journey of yours,” Marco says, offering his hand, and there’s such a kind smile on his face that there’s no way Steven would ever say no. He didn’t want to say no anyways.

“Okay!” he gleefully shakes his new friend’s hand.

On the other side of the room, a girl clothed in all the colours of the rainbow and probably some more sits and sulks while chewing a lemon bar. She’s scowling, even though the lemon bar is absolutely delicious, because as it turns out, Pacifica had to cancel their plans to meet up for a small shopping spree that was planned for today, and now Mabel was left with nothing to do. And she hates having nothing to do, because then she has to go home and with no distractions starts fidgeting, and fidgeting inevitably leads to making more sweaters and she already has too many. She could probably start selling them at this point. But she can’t keep knitting out of stress and guilt, because she’s pretty sure that could curse whatever she makes.

She’s read a lot about that, curses. And witchcraft, she studied that too. Even though according to her great uncle Stanford most of it wasn’t real, she still liked it, and she discovered sigils that did actually hold some magic to them. Right now, though, she’d trade all her knowledge of witchcraft for not having to go home and die of boredom, because for the past few weeks she was stuck in too much of a routine and it was taking a toll on her sanity.

As she walks over to the snack table to check if there are any lemon bars left, she can’t help but overhear a conversation of two boys sitting aside from the other people.

“Okay, so I take it there’s some normal human stuff that you’d like to do?”

“Mmm… well, yeah. There’s lots of things that just never happened for me, I suppose.”

“We could start by buying you a new shirt, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I only met you here about three times but you always have the same shirt, and either you have more or you’re wearing the same one every time.”

“I have more,” Steven says a little defensively, “they just all look the same!”

Marco looks at him for a solid few seconds, considering such a reply. “Is it because you like the routine or…?”

“My dad used to be a rockstar. Well, tried to be, at least. The shirts were part of his merch and I just sort of… inherited all of them.”

“So not only have you been wearing the same shirts whenever you came here. You’ve been wearing the same shirts all your life?” Marco questions but bites his tongue when he notices bright pink colour seeping into Steven’s skin. “H-hey, it’s really no big deal, really!”

“No, it is, it’s weird, isn’t it,” the boy with glowing skin mumbles, stress tightening his muscles as he subconsciously grips his hair with one of his hands, the other firmly holding onto the chair he’s sitting on. Steven quickly finds himself drowning in panic, he’s too weird even for kids who went through all sorts of chaos themselves, because at least they had normal childhoods where he had nothing, they got to grow up like humans while he was learning to be a gem.  _ This isn’t fair, _ his mind screams, and his view is now tinted pink, and he knows what will inevitably follow, chaos and destruction, maybe not a monster-level of it but it’s definitely happening and he can’t stop but he desperately wants it to, but he just can’t–

“Steven, hey, hey Steeb, deep breaths. Inhale and count to five.”

He follows the instructions that come to him through his shame-induced panicky haze, slowly taking a breath in.

“Okay, great, now slowly exhale,” a voice prompts him, and he obeys.

“Awesome, now one more time - inhale, count to five.” So he does. “Slowly let it out.” So he does.

The pink evaporates from his vision and he blinks. A very relieved Marco is still sitting next to him, but a new person is now with them, a girl with long brown hair and too many accessories decorating her clothes and body sitting cross legged in front of him on the floor and looking up at him happily. “There you go!” she says, “you’re welcome.”

It must’ve been her then, who brought him back to reality. As he shakes off the remnants of what could’ve been another anxiety attack, he realizes that he knows her. It’s the girl who reminds him so much of Spinel, Mabel Pines. And hold up, did she… did she just call him Steeb?

“Sorry, did you just–”

“If you’re planning to go buy clothes, would you two mind if I tag along?” she asks, pleadingly. “I have nothing to do and would really appreciate some company, plus I have great fashion sense!”

“Oh yeah?” Marco looks her over. “I’ve literally never seen any proof of that.”

Mabel sticks her tongue out at him. “Please, Star told me you once wore a rug as a cape for months, I think I’m better off than you.”

“I– wha– It wasn’t  _ months _ !”

“Wait, you two know each other?” Steven said, still a little dazed and overwhelmed.

“Oh, yeah,” Marco grins apologetically, “this is Mabel Pines. She and her family have a history with cryptids of all sorts!”

“So… monster hunters?”

“Beside everything else,” Mabel nods, “we also dabble in witchcraft, portal-related science, and demons causing apocalypses. Which we sometimes  _ cause _ in the first place, but not on purpose,” she utters the last words quietly.

“That’s really cool,” Steven says, and he means it. What she says doesn’t sound that much different from what he used to do. Monster hunting, and magic, and portals… not demons, though. Well, his own demons, maybe.  _ Hey, stop that, _ he scolds himself internally.  _ We’re not thinking about demons today. We’re making friends!  _ For a second he thinks his internal voice sounds like when he was younger, and it makes him smile, and he stands up. “Mabel, if you want to go with us, you’re more than welcome. I have no idea if I have a fashion sense, but I bet I could use some advice.”

“Awesome sauce!” she pumps her fists in the air excitedly and jumps up. She is  _ also _ taller than him. He makes it a point not to compare his height to others, because after all, Steven ages slower, and grows slower. Well, most of the time  _ nonono no we are not thinking about that now, now we’re going SHOPPING! _

“Right,” Marco takes the lead as they all head towards the door. “There’s a mall just around the corner. Let’s go outfit hunting!”

———

“Woah!” Steven gasps in wonder as they enter the glass door to the two-story mall. In the center of it’s ceiling is a glass dome, and each of the square panels of glass is a different colour, painting the white tiles underneath with blurred colours as sun shines through. On the ground floor, numerous benches are situated near the walls and big pots with plants decorate the mall and give it a little less artificial atmosphere. All in all the place looks really cool and, despite many people walking around and creating the usual cacophony of a busy crowd, calm.

“Is this your first mall?” Mabel asks with an amused smile.

“Well, no, but every mall looks different and I haven’t been to this one yet!” They walk a little further in, and Steven’s eyes keep darting from one thing to another, and he’s surrounded by all sorts of smells and people and shops, and it all looks so… normal. So mundane. So casual.

It makes him buzz with joy. “Okay, where do we start??” he turns to the other two, and Marco shrugs, so Mabel points in one direction: “The biggest shop is this way, so let’s check that one out. If we don’t find anything we like, we can look through the smaller ones.” Like Steven, she also seems filled with energy and excitement. “But I doubt it, this one has anything and everything!”

They head towards the clothes shop and barely do they enter, when Marco spots a rack full of colorful shirts and starts combing through them. Steven approaches with more hesitance, but Marco just waves for him to come closer: “C’mere, I’m sure you’re going to love some of these!”

Before any of them knows it, they’re all collecting pieces of garment they find fitting to their each individual style, and after a while all three of them carry their piled up favourites over to the fitting rooms.

Trying on the first shirt, Steven can’t help but frown at the unfamiliar texture of the fabric brushing against his skin. He’s so used to the star shirts, and this one feels different, and looks different, and  _ ugh, it feels weird. _ He isn’t too fond of it, but unsure if it’s just because it’s new or if he has an actual problem with the texture, he puts it aside to try it again later. Instead, he searches through the pile of shirts with his hands, and lets out a quiet but victorious “aha!” when he comes into contact with fabric that feels familiar enough. His search continues for a few more seconds as he pulls three more shirts out of the pile and tries them on This time, he feels much more comfortable, and so he looks at himself in the mirror, and a simple design of a small turquoise hummingbird above where his heart is looks really cute. The fabric itself is a pastel blue and… he freezes. How long has it been since he’s worn a shirt that wasn’t a black colour? More importantly, why is that a detail all his focus is dragged towards? Had he subconsciously been using the black colour as a reflection of his feelings?

He scoffs at his thoughts. That’s silly. Or… is it?

Mabel’s voice calls to him from behind the curtain of the small booth. “Hey Steeble, I found something really cool I think you should try on! Can I show you?”

“U-uh, sure?”

Mabel comes in, but holds whatever she’s found behind the curtain as she starts explaining: “Okay so I’ve noticed that you like that varsity jacket of yours a lot. But I also think that you deserve to look edgy when you feel like it and that marshmallow aesthetic really won’t do that for you. Soooo,” she finally shows him her discovery, “I thought you might wanna try  _ this _ on!”

What she’s holding is absolutely jarring to him. It’s a black leather jacket, and it has small spikes jutting out on its shoulders as well as around the wrists. Skeptical, he looks up at her: “I’m not so sure, Mabel. It’s not really… me.”

“Oh, Steeb, don’t be a dingdong. That might be because it hasn’t ever been you before,” she tilts her head to the side. “If you could always be only what and where you’ve already been, you’d never get anywhere.”

Her last sentence hits him like a truck and as he ponders it, he comes to the conclusion that she’s right. And he hates that by mentioning change in such a way, she’s one step closer to being just like Spinel. She reminds him of Homeworld, but also of home, and the fact that he’s not there anymore. He’s here and he’s exploring and he has new friends to help. And he trusts these friends, because he’s only known them closely for about an hour, but he’s heard their stories and they’ve heard his, and in that, they have been connected ever since their stupid destinies gave them trauma.

Thus, he puts the jacket on, closes his eyes, clenches his jaw, and turns away from Mabel to face the mirror.

Carefully, he opens one eye, than the other. His reflection is blinking back at him, just as taken aback as he is, because  _ wow _ . The jacket looks nice. He looks nice in it. His eyes travel over the spikes on his shoulders and a mental image forms in his mind of a monster, of a monster he’d become once, but this isn’t monstrous. He can take the spikes off whenever he wants. And he can wear them when he feels they suit his mood and day.

“Mabel, Marco has severely underestimated you,” he says matter-of-factly.

“Duh,” she smirks, but it’s obvious she’s just happy to help. “Let’s show him!” the girl catches Steven by his elbow and drags him out of the booth. “Marco! Marco Marci Marzipan! Come out here, you’ve got to see how amazing Steebs looks in this jacket I found–”

Marco’s head peeks out, and, scanning Steven from head to toes, he nods in approval: “Spikes, huh? Not bad. I do feel like wearing them sometimes, but rarely. You know what I felt like today, though?”

“Wha- is that all you’re gonna say?? He looks amazing! You’ve been underappreciating my skills this whole time but there’s a difference between what I wear and what I recommend to others, you know, and–”

The waterfall of words pouring out of her mouth stops abruptly as Marco steps out from behind his own curtain… in a dress.

Both the boy in a spiky jacket and the girl who’d found it are left staring, while Marco, perfectly aware of their gazes, grins happily and twirls around, showing off a yellow summer dress with big sunflowers stitched onto the skirt and a bow tied just above the waist. “Pretty, isn’t it?”

Without missing a beat and with stars in his eyes, Steven quickly agrees: “So pretty, I think I stopped breathing for a moment.”

“Aw, thank you!” his friend gives a small princess-like curtsy. “I really do like this one, I might be taking it home.”

In the end, they spend about fourth five more minutes in the store, and when they finally do get out, they’re not disappointed. Steven carries with him a bag filled with soft shirts and one or two dresses because he couldn’t resist, Marco only bought the summer dress he liked so much, and Mabel holds a bag with a whole palette of garments she found described her well.

She looks at how happy the two are with pride, but then something jabs at her heart. No that they’ve had a great day, will they ever want to do it again? Maybe they hadn’t had a great day. Maybe they’d come along just because she has no one else to hang out. And now they’ll go home and never talk to her again, oh no oh no oh no–

“Man, this was nice.”

“It really was!”

“Hey guys… would you like to hang out again like this?” she asks, her usual energy gone for a moment.

“Yeah, sure.”

“I don’t see why not, I had fun.”

“Good…” she says with so little enthusiasm she sounds like she’s about to fall asleep.

Marco squints his eyes at her, feeling as though something is off. “Mabel, you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s just… Ugh, I should be saying this in therapy and not in a mall, but I’ve been stuck in a routine for some time now and I hate it, whenever it happens it drives me nuts! And Pacifica canceled our plans tonight and that sort of triggers this dumb worry that she doesn’t wanna talk anymore, and that she’s leaving me behind, and that Dipper wants to go away to study cryptids and never come back, and my uncles might leave for an adventure and never come back either–”

Steven’s eyes widened. He recognized this spiral. And he refused to let his new friend fall too deep into it. Carefully, he reached for her shoulder: “Mabel, I know the feeling of everyone leaving you behind. But they’re not. They never stop loving you, although they might move to new places. After all, if they could always be only where they’ve already been, they wouldn’t ever get anywhere. And staying in one place would get really boring eventually.”  _ I should know, after all. _

“But leaving people feels horrible!” she whines, closing her eyes shut to avoid looking at them.

“Yeah,” Marco gently took her other shoulder, “I get that. At one point, I had to leave Star, and for all I knew, I’d never see her again. But I did it anyway because sometimes, that’s the best thing you can do for people. You give them space to live and to be what they need to be, and it’s for their own good and for the good of their families, or their people, or their whole worlds.”

“But what about  _ my _ good, though?! What about my part of the world?”

“There needs to be a balance,” Steven shrugged. “And it’s hard, admittedly, but isn’t that why we’re in therapy? To get the balance back?”

She takes a while to calm down, but eventually, she does. “...yeah. Yeah, you’re both right.”

The sun is setting. No longer does rainbow pour in through the stained glass, instead shades of orange flood the ground floor through the glass entrance, through which the glowing ball of fire is visible hiding beyond the horizon. The crowds slowly dissipate, their collective voice quieter and quieter until it goes completely mute, leaving only three kids sitting on a bench and enjoying the emptiness of a place that’s built to hold so many more people. Maybe now that it’s empty, it can hold their past, their histories, and their troubled thoughts.

A disembodied voice informs them that the mall is closing for the day and that they are required to leave.

As they stand up and with no rush walk towards the exit, Mabel turns to admire the mall one more time, and she says:“This reminds me of Stranger Things so much.”

“Oh,” Marco smiles knowingly, “I’d love to rewatch that before the new season comes out.”

Steven watches them both with new confusion, although it no longer induces stress in him. “What’s ‘Stranger Things’?”

Marco and Mabel looked first at him, then at each other, and then at him again. “Well,” Mabel smiled, “I guess we have a reason to hang out again.”

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed this small story! I have a blog on Tumblr @goodendfriends where you can find my art and ask me questions so don’t hesitate to head on over there if you have more ideas to add to this AU!  
> Also I’ve got an illustration for this story there: https://goodendfriends.tumblr.com/post/614419727228551168/steven-in-spiky-jacketgood-also-marco-has


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